Gorboduc as a Tragic Discovery of "Feudalism"

Renaissance literary studies have long depended on the master narrative of an "early modern" transition from "feudalism" to "capitalism": from a conglomeration of land-based, militarized, and politicized households to a nation of privatized households governed by a centralized "state." Like all such narratives, this one is a fiction, a questionable way of organizing disparate facts of social change and historical difference. ¹ Yet still not completely explored is the extent to which the modern fiction takes its cue from discourses that thrived during the putative period of transition itself. True, historians of historiography have discussed the extent to which narratives of the decline of what we call "feudalism," if not the rise of a "market economy," may be attributed to Jacobean and even Elizabethan antiquaries. ² But I want to suggest that this early modern sense of transition extends beyond the purview of the Jacobean antiquaries who introduced the word "feudal" into English, or of their late Elizabethan predecessors who may have had some concept, avant la lettre, of what we might call a "feudal" system of governing and householding. Early modern fictions of the decline of such a system occurred where fiction thrived most notoriously: in the theater--in plays staged in the great monarchical and aristocratic institutions that constituted the legacy of medieval domestic government during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, these fictions seem to predate the historiographical narrative of things "feudal" that was born in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and that developed into the full-fledged theory of a "feudal" social system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Doubtless, such precocious theatrical remembrances of "feudal" householding were not the primary purpose of early modern playwrights; they were by-products of theatrical efforts to come to terms with immediate problems and crises. But even as accidents, they suggest important connections between early modern constructions of historical difference and the Elizabethan stage, along with its generic innovations and its complex and conflicting constructions of gender, authority, and ownership.

Perhaps the earliest play to stage the demise of what we call "feudal" householding is The Tragedy of Gorboduc, the first English drama modeled on classical tragic form. Gorboduc was performed before Queen Elizabeth and her household as part of a lavish Christmas celebration of 18 January 1561/2. Three weeks earlier, it had been staged, with a masque and mock tilt, at the Inner Temple household, where the guests had included a contingent from the Council, including Robert Dudley, the Queen's Master of the Horse, who had arranged to bring the performances to Whitehall. Obviously, the event was designed to entertain, but it also had political importance, no doubt helping to strengthen relations between the Inner Temple and royal household and allowing the Inns of Court men to pursue the favor of magnates close to the queen, particularly those concerned with the question of who would succeed their royal mistress. The masque urged the queen to marry and produce an heir, offering Dudley as a suitor; the play warned the queen against a match with a foreign prince, the king of Sweden, alluded to the unsuitability of her cousin, the Catholic queen of Scotland, as an heir, and advertised the dangers of an uncertain succession. ³

There was nothing strange about mixing affairs of state with household theater. The Inn's Men's performance belonged to a broader tradition of theatrical devices--pageants, masks, processions--employed by the great households to conduct affairs of government. As Suzanne R. Westfall observes, the pervasiveness of this tradition after the Wars of the Roses also suggests a tenuousness of immediate territorial control exercised by great households. Lacking the military might to protect their holdings from each other, and lacking the unity of interest with each other and their tenants necessary to impose their will over vast territories, they employed the ideological tools of pageantry and drama, complete with imitations...